Developing highly complex distributed systems: a software engineering perspective

What is a highly complex distributed system in the future era? What are the needs that may drive the development of such systems? And what is their life cycle? Is there any new challenge for Software Engineering (SE)? In this paper, we try to provide a partial answer to the above questions by characterizing few application domains that we consider of raising interest in the next years. Our thesis is that there is a need to rethink the whole software process for such systems. The traditional boundaries between static and dynamic activities disappear and development support mingles with run time support thus invading the middleware territory.